Read Online Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Marc Weidenbaum
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its title and key sample from the addled, genius spiel that Gene Wilder utters in Mel Stuart’s
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
, the film musical adaptation of the Roald Dahl book. What was less clear at the time, because Aphex Twin’s interest in lucid dreaming was just beginning to be appreciated by his listeners, was the extent to which it was the second line of the famous phrase that had special meaning for him: “We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams.” Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka was himself, like Aphex Twin, sampling the material, since the phrase was not Wonka’s—or author Dahl’s for that matter—but a poem by nineteenth-century author Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy.
Sire Records’ Risa Morley had her own anecdote about lucid dreaming. “One time I called him,” she told me. “It was really late at night but he told me to call him any time, including late at night. I called him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he was lucid dreaming. He was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I was like, ‘I am in my office, working.’ He’s like, ‘I am lucid dreaming.’ But I would call and we would have these really crazy conversations.”
Chrysalis’ Clive Gabriel has a similar recollection: “I remember him discussing it briefly with me, when we were going to a meeting once, about his whole sleep deprivation thing,” Gabriel said during our interview. “He found the idea of sleep deprivation really fascinating. He was so deprived of sleep. He was kind of writing—‘autopilot’ is not the right word, but almost writing out of body. It was this sleep-deprived thing, being up for days and days.”
When I interviewed Aphex Twin in 1996, he made a more practical association between a sleepless state and music-making, explaining why he mostly worked in his bedroom at the time. “To me, it’s essential to be able to work,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t realize it when I was growing up, until I moved my studio like out of my bedroom into another room—when I came to London I thought that was a really good idea: you know, studio in one room and bedroom in another—got really excited. And I just, for ages, I just wasn’t as happy and I couldn’t work it out, just ’cause I wasn’t sleeping in the same room as my stuff. There’s something magical about having all your equipment in the same room as your bed, and you just get out of bed and like do a track and go back to sleep and then get up and do some more and do tracks in your pants and stuff.”
In 1997 I interviewed the musician Luke Vibert, like Aphex Twin a Cornwall native. I asked him if most of his friends worked in their bedrooms, as he did. “Yeah, they do,” Vibert said. “Pretty similar, although Aphex has just got hundreds and hundreds of things in a lush little bedroom setup. Most of the others are quite small, like mine.”
## The Neuromancer Naps
As fellow delver into the early realms of digital proto-culture William Gibson put it, “lucid dreaming” is akin to a constructive, purposeful doze.
“I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more,” the novelist told an interviewer for the
Paris Review
in a 2011 article about his writing process. The “it” in Gibson’s sentence was the act of writing. He continued: “And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”
This from the man who not only branded cyberspace, but who likened that non-space—that space without the physical confines we associate with space—to a consensual hallucination. As Gibson wrote in his debut novel,
Neuromancer
: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.” Many took that hallucination as a drug reference. John Leland in his history of hip (title:
Hip: The History
) wrote: “At times cyberspace seemed an
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
, the film musical adaptation of the Roald Dahl book. What was less clear at the time, because Aphex Twin’s interest in lucid dreaming was just beginning to be appreciated by his listeners, was the extent to which it was the second line of the famous phrase that had special meaning for him: “We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams.” Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka was himself, like Aphex Twin, sampling the material, since the phrase was not Wonka’s—or author Dahl’s for that matter—but a poem by nineteenth-century author Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy.
Sire Records’ Risa Morley had her own anecdote about lucid dreaming. “One time I called him,” she told me. “It was really late at night but he told me to call him any time, including late at night. I called him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he was lucid dreaming. He was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I was like, ‘I am in my office, working.’ He’s like, ‘I am lucid dreaming.’ But I would call and we would have these really crazy conversations.”
Chrysalis’ Clive Gabriel has a similar recollection: “I remember him discussing it briefly with me, when we were going to a meeting once, about his whole sleep deprivation thing,” Gabriel said during our interview. “He found the idea of sleep deprivation really fascinating. He was so deprived of sleep. He was kind of writing—‘autopilot’ is not the right word, but almost writing out of body. It was this sleep-deprived thing, being up for days and days.”
When I interviewed Aphex Twin in 1996, he made a more practical association between a sleepless state and music-making, explaining why he mostly worked in his bedroom at the time. “To me, it’s essential to be able to work,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t realize it when I was growing up, until I moved my studio like out of my bedroom into another room—when I came to London I thought that was a really good idea: you know, studio in one room and bedroom in another—got really excited. And I just, for ages, I just wasn’t as happy and I couldn’t work it out, just ’cause I wasn’t sleeping in the same room as my stuff. There’s something magical about having all your equipment in the same room as your bed, and you just get out of bed and like do a track and go back to sleep and then get up and do some more and do tracks in your pants and stuff.”
In 1997 I interviewed the musician Luke Vibert, like Aphex Twin a Cornwall native. I asked him if most of his friends worked in their bedrooms, as he did. “Yeah, they do,” Vibert said. “Pretty similar, although Aphex has just got hundreds and hundreds of things in a lush little bedroom setup. Most of the others are quite small, like mine.”
## The Neuromancer Naps
As fellow delver into the early realms of digital proto-culture William Gibson put it, “lucid dreaming” is akin to a constructive, purposeful doze.
“I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more,” the novelist told an interviewer for the
Paris Review
in a 2011 article about his writing process. The “it” in Gibson’s sentence was the act of writing. He continued: “And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”
This from the man who not only branded cyberspace, but who likened that non-space—that space without the physical confines we associate with space—to a consensual hallucination. As Gibson wrote in his debut novel,
Neuromancer
: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.” Many took that hallucination as a drug reference. John Leland in his history of hip (title:
Hip: The History
) wrote: “At times cyberspace seemed an
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